ABSTRACT
I am now 48 years old and have been in pain for 35 years. When I was three years old, I accidentally opened the rear door of a moving car, fell to the curb, injured my head, and was in the hospital for a number of days with a concussion. When I was six, my mother hit the brakes too hard one day and I injured my head on the dashboard of our 1948 Buick; dashboards were not padded in those days. I grew up in the Midwest and enjoyed an active life of sports, including skating and football, among others. These were rugged sports and I frequently fell and/or was injured in skating and tobogganing. When I was eight, I was hospitalized at a university hospital for severe allergy problems. When I was ten, I was evaluated for thyroid abnormalities. The allergy testing resulted in some desensitization injections. The thyroid testing proved borderline and no treatment was undertaken. By the time I was 13,1 was troubled with severe headaches at least once per week. My mother told me these were “sinus headaches.” Sometimes they responded to aspirin and sometimes not. As I grew older, the frequency of the headaches increased. I played center on my high school football team, and by the time I got to college, I had so many aches and pains in my back that I decided not to participate in college football. During my years in college, the competition was rugged, the studies were demanding, and the stress was great. I frequently drank large amounts of caffeinated coffee to get more hours of study out of every day. By age 18, I was plagued by increasing episodes of irritable bowel syndrome which were marked by frequent indigestion and occasional attacks of diarrhea. Pizza seemed to be the food that most frequently gave me indigestion and milk was the food that most frequently gave me diarrhea. I went on from college to postgraduate studies at a very competitive university, carrying a tremendous load of course material that was extremely challenging. My knees began to ache during my postgraduate work. The problem increased over the years. My major course of studies was fiercely competitive and, struggling to achieve the highest grades possible, by the time I finished my postgraduate studies, I was plagued by three major headaches a week. The headaches were intensified by stress and aggravated by exposure to bright light. They frequently responded to two to three tablets of Excedrin®, but sometimes no amount of nonprescription medication controlled the headaches, and I had to recede to a dark room with a pillow over my head or merely sleep the headache off overnight.
